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Big Iron

As part of the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), The Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH has purchased an SGI Altix supercomputer to help the United States military maintain its technological supremacy over its adversaries in weapon systems. The SGI Altix supercomputer will be available to more than 1,000 researchers across the U.S. DoD, and will be used to: aid weapon systems design of innovative materials; advance design concepts; improve and speed modification programs; increase high fidelity simulations; and enable more efficient tests and evaluations.

A spokesman noted that this massive shared-memory system from SGI allows the DoD to simulate entire aircraft, entire weapon systems, and entire battlefield engagements, with fidelity not possible before now.

Named “Eagle” by the ASC MSRC and part of the DoD HPCMP’s Technology Insertion for fiscal year 2005 (TI-05), the Altix supercomputer is powered by 2,048 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium 2 processors, 2TB of memory, SGI’s NUMAlink interconnect, and 128TB of disk. During a test run at SGI’s manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls, WI, the new system achieved Linpack benchmark performance of 11.636 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) while operating at over 90% efficiency. The entire 2TB of memory is globally addressable by any processor in the system, which will run the Linux operating system and support the Intel C, C++, and Fortran compilers. SGI Altix computing architecture allows both clustering (scaling out) of individual nodes and scalability (scaling up) of each node from 4 to 512 processors sharing up to 4TB of physical memory.

The Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC) Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) is a computational science facility supporting Department of Defense (DoD) research, development, and test and evaluation communities with high performance computing and visualization resources. Created as part of the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), the ASC MSRC High Performance Computing Center is located on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is one of four DoD MSRC sites. SGI has had a presence at Wright-Patterson for almost 20 years, and this latest system expands ASC MSRC’s SGI supercomputing capability to more than 4,100 processors spread across five separate shared memory SGI systems.

The U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Technology Service is the official buyer of the “Eagle” system. Official Air Force Release.